A meat counter in a store I often visited in Mississippi had a handwritten sign over the cash register: 'When all is said and done more will have been said than done.' Photographers—and photographs—are about doing, about engaging, more than merely just saying. For all a photograph can tell it exists because someone went somewhere, saw something, and used their camera to do something about it.

"The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious" — Tom Rankin

To document, to record, image or sound, or both, is about going somewhere, seeing something and “doing something about it.” It’s about creating a public record.

I began my work on the series, which includes Public Secrets and Blood Sugar by visiting a needle exchange tent-site in east Oakland and “seeing something.” “Doing something about it” required entering another sphere – the space of what Jacques Ranciere describes as “the part that has no part.” It is a “going somewhere” that requires movement across multiple registers.

To attend the needle exchange I only had to walk down the street, but my encounter there was a revelation, which is described in the framing texts of Blood Sugar. My subsequent visits to the Alameda county jail and California state prisons, which formed the basis of Public Secrets, meant crossing the boundary between public and carceral space, adhering to bureaucratic regulations and accepting invasive search and surveillance procedures.

For the men and women I met in these spaces, injection drug users living outside the norms of society in the shadow of the criminal justice system and men and women trapped inside the prison system, the statements I recorded were acts of juridical and political testimony. Public Secrets and Blood Sugar serve as a public record of this testimony - not only what was said but also what I learned from it.

Begin this path: Public Records

1. Inquiry | Argument
2. Narrative | Theory

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